Way Back Home
by starliequinn
Summary: You can plan your life, but it never turns out that way. Try waking up 200 years in the future and try to tell me that's what I had planned all along to past the Bar exam. Female Sole Survivor Nora seeks out her son with synth Detective Nick Valentine and has many misadventures along the way. Summary/Rating to change, possible OC appearance and and SS/NV romance later on.
1. Chapter 1

Cicadas. She always knew the time and the weather from to the sound of the cicadas. They were humming, no- _buzzing_ , again in the distance. Though with the lack of proper windows and walls and general sounds from the settlement, it wasn't very difficult to hear them from within the house. It was already early evening, and although she had started the day off early this morning, she put herself right back in bed sometime around noon. She probably could have tried to leave town, but once the echoing cracks of thunder and sickly glow starts to set it, it's hard to tell which direction it's coming from, therefore hard to tell which way she needed to go. Sleeping was the only other way to ride out a radiation storm once it decided to come through.

Nora Pendragon, the Sole Survivor of Vault 111, pulled a heavy lead-lined comforter up a little more. Sleepily noting she could hear cicadas over her geiger counter, she wondered how many rads she had sucked up this time. _Fourty, maybe fifty?_ She felt her face and checked it for any ghoulish pockmarks. Nothing of the sort. _So far so good_ , she noted, despite feeling very much less than 100 percent. _Ugh. Does Rad-X work at all?_ She kept her eyes shut, refusing to acknowledge the outside world. More importantly, she was refusing to look and acknowledge the thick-needled syringe she would need for Rad-Away that sat atop a pile of leather next to the mattress, amongst other things.

"'You plannin' on taking another nap?"

Nora stretched and threw the quilt off, in a motion of defiance to her body. It probably would have been easier to just sleep through the night and start over again the next morning, but that all went out the proverbial window once duty called. Duty, that went by the name of Nick Valentine.

"Well, I do need my beauty sleep," she retorted, grabbing the side of a nearby armchair to pull herself up from the floor.

Nick snorted. "If that's the case, you're gonna need more than just a few hours." Nora paused, turning her head sharply to shoot him a confused but obviously dirty look. "Er, that was pretty tactless, even from me. Sorry." Her expression softened again, accepting of the apology. That was their relationship: one sarcastic remark toeing the line of yet another sarcastic remark; there were times she couldn't be sure if it was the old Nick's personality, or the synth's lack of human that caused him to slip up in his judgement. She honestly couldn't tell which Nick the apology came from.

It had been probably a month since the thaw. The Pipboy said it was sometime into November, and she wondered if Thanksgiving had passed yet. Without proper recorded weekdays, it's hard to count to the third Thursday. Hell, it was hard to tell what seasons are now in Boston, given the surely different personality the atmosphere had taken on from nuclear devastation. Perhaps someone, somewhere, was keeping a record of these tedious pre-war things, but it wasn't widely available.

Nora glanced out at the sky, trying to remember if it looked like it had before-in her childhood, when the weather had its freedom. Sometime after she turned 15, Boston was one of the first major cities to have a completely controlled weather system put in place for testing. Weather was mild year round. It rained when they wanted, so sports could plan practice and games accordingly, farmers knew when not to water their crops, and local businesses knew how to manipulate the market ahead of time. Winter was somewhat special; every evening it snowed for the enjoyment of the citizens, and began to thaw out after midnight so they would be able to get to work by morning. Only on Christmas would the system allow continuous light snowfall for 16 hours. The technology behind it wasn't one she tried to comprehend at that age, nor admittedly into her adult years, but it was things like that that lead to...

She looked away, pushing her leg through some dented metal that barely covered her thighs. In this month, a lot had happened-she met a group of people that got held up by Raiders in Concord, discovered what it was like to become a human mecha using Power Armor, saw a sort of shanty town formed into the old Fenway Park, met a Paladin that wasn't from D&D, fought a large _thing_ living in Swan Pond (therefore finding out what a Super Mutant was), killed off a bunch of zombies, killed a lot of heavily mutated animals and insects, launched a rocket, and recently gave her missing child case to a robot man she dug out from an old vault filled with mobsters on the an old woman whom she had given drugs to (twice) because she claimed to have visions.

 _"You find the heart that leads you to your boy_ ," she said, " _So bright against the dark alleyways it walks."_

She looked at Nick, who put down a screwdriver he'd fished from his pocket and looked back immediately. _"Follow the signs to the bright heart."_ Nora had taken Mama's Murphy's words with a grain of salt, but she really had meant to follow the signs to the bright heart. Nick's Detective Agency signs really had been bright neon with the last one a literal heart and arrow. _A bright heart._

"What?" he asked, and she realised she had been staring a tad too long to stay unnoticed. She returned her gaze to the window for a moment without answering. From outside the window, she could hear the bustle of Sanctuary Hills going through the motions of living. Surviving mostly, but it almost sounded like thriving. Marcy Long could be heard snapping at someone (she was glad it was not her for once), a water pump was being used somewhere, and the DJ from "D-Diamond City Radio" was giving updates on Commonwealth rumors.

Nora rolled her shoulders, and began folding up the quilt to be put into a corner that used to be a closet. Maybe today, should would make a door. _Or, maybe today, Preston will send me out on yet_ another _settlement complaint,_ she thought to herself.

 _Oh. That sounds a bit bitter._ "'Meant to ask if you heard anything from Garvey while I was out," she said in earnest, trying to suppress her small feeling of guilt at her last thought. It wasn't as though she didn't feel like these settlements really needed her, but thought the organisation was called Minute _men_ , not Minute _man_ (or Minute _woman_ for that matter).

Nick handed her the dose of Rad-Away as she reached for it. "Not since the last one, no."

"Right, that place up near Ballardvale," Nora said, nodding towards a Pipboy on the dresser, mentally noting the place as Tenpines Bluff as Preston had mapped for her. The synth laughed dryly.

"Haven't heard anyone outside of Goodneighbor refer to it as _that_ ," he said, "If anyone even does anymore."

The name sparked up an interest in her lawyer memory bank, but it had nothing to do with place names. "Goodneighbor?"

Nick nodded and said, "Yeah. Scollay Square." He paused, most likely waiting to see if Nora would recognise the name before continuing. "Goodneighbor's where a lot of ghouls went after the mayor kicked them out of Diamond City. The whole setup is run by an ex-drug addict going by the name of John Hancock. 'Don't know if that's his real name, though." Nora smiled, lacing up her second boot. Of all the people she could have met in this new world, she was so very grateful to find someone who knew the old ways; someone who would have been to Scollay Square, who knew the difference between this Tenpines Bluff and Ballardvale, and even had something to say about someone parading around under the name of John Hancock. Through Nick, Boston lives; without him, there is the Commonwealth.

She felt her smile fade as something her mother used to say started to creep in: "When the past calls, don't answer. It never has anything new to say." _Things like Ballardvale and Scollay Square and the original John Hancock don't matter in this world,_ she told herself. Things like weather control and Thanksgiving, they don't matter now. Though one thing was to be certain for her: with Nick, the hope of seeing her son again lives; without him, there is nothing but the Commonwealth. She glanced at Nick as he watched her face, obviously calculating what she may be thinking. She'd only known him for a few weeks, but seeing as he was the only person who frequently traveled with her, they caught each other doing this quite often.

 _'Guess those are things you notice when you have television to distract you._ "Look at us," she said picking up a rather heavy-looking ballistic rucksack. She slung it onto the desk and began rifling through it. "Just a pair of Old-timers, and not a wrinkle to show for it."

"Speak for yourself," Nick replied, "I'm 247 years young, thank you very much. And you left the Rad-Away on the pillow."

"I'm checking to see if I have any more," she replied, "I might just need to save that one until it gets really bad."

"Maybe we should find you one of those hazmat suits to sleep in, since you're not acclimated," he thought aloud, "I wonder if you could pick it off of an old body in the ruins."

Nora cringed in disgust. "I'm not taking clothes from skeletons," she nearly sputtered, horrified at the thought. Taking armor and guns from freshly dead corpses is one thing, but apparently she drew the line at looting dusty old bones. When she couldn't find what she was looking for, Nora sighed, clipped the sack closed and slipped her arms through the straps. "Anyway, Raiders or Ferals?"

"Garvey said it was Raiders, down in the Fens," Nick yawned (though Nora was almost sure it out of habit or was for her benefit, as she was not sure synths actually breathed).

"Oh, please try to sound a bit more excited than that," she said, shifting past him through the door, "After all-it's another beautiful day in the most dangerous place in the world."

-  
 **A/N:** Hey, Charlie here. Taking a break from FO4, I started this while stuck during a game breaking bug most people get from Underground Undercover (I'm also a huge fan of ladywyntre's personal journal for Nick Valentine, which inspired me to write and you should go check out.) I eventually figured out how to get past it and played on to finish with my prefered faction, but the idea of writing a piece involving my Sole Survivor stayed with me. I want to write about some backstory about pre-war according to Nora, talk about Vault experimentation and the 'whatever-happened-to's of the past, introduce an OC so I can write without having my character fret about finding her son, and (of course) most likely romance Nick because who doesn't want that? If not Nick, it'll be Hancock, but it's too early in to say where it'll go.

Anyway, this took me a little to write and I'm not sure how this website works, so I'm also looking for some constructive criticism on my writing style and will probably message back anyone who seriously provides any. Also, I will most likely roll through these again after gaining a fresh set of eyes (read: SLEEP) and check it out for grammar, continuity errors, and overall editing.

Thanks for reading, and have a good winter solstice, folks. _Stay safe out there._


	2. Chapter 2

If there's anything Nora was learning very quickly about the Commonwealth, it would be that she couldn't go very far without something interesting going on close by. Sometimes this interesting thing was something good, like running into a man trying to sell you a dog (" _Only_ 200 caps for such a sweet-looking baby? _Done!_ "). Other times the interesting things were not so good, like an ambush of mutated, oversized scorpions rising up from absolutely nowhere ("Oh, come on! Of all the things to survive, these guys get an upgrade, too?!"). Every so often they may run into something harmless and mundane, like activating some old pre-war relay towers and getting some repeating radio signals from them. These lead to some sad souls' last words over the air, like families separated or people being trapped in their bunkers after the bombs fell. Nora figured they ought to go sort these out sometime, considering no one has heard these broadcasts in over 200 years.

Lastly, in her time out in the wastes, her favourite things have become the ones that you hear in tales from the caravan hands. Whenever they'd stop to trade off some raider trash for some dented hot plates or caps, she made she to remain friendly with them in case she would need to call on them in the future for some good information. She could only imagine the things they've seen, the stories they've heard; some were so fascinatingly interesting that they may as well be filed under "I can't make this stuff up," because who would in their right mind would believe it?

After a few days of fending off mostly wild creatures and avoiding people-infested buildings, they were glad to fall into the hospitality of two sister farmers at Oberland Station. Nick was graciously tending to their hosts while she headed upstairs to get some sleep. Not that she wouldn't have continued on through until they reached Diamond City, but his insistence that he needed a fresh set of eyes instead of a pair of dead ones on the road were the words that caused her to give up and stop in for the night. _So_ _glad to have a partner who is more stubborn about my health than I am_ , she thought, rolling her eyes. If she wasn't so sure his interest wasn't just for himself and her ability to watch _his_ back, she might have found it adoring. She grinned anyway in spite of herself.

Nora changed into a set of freshly laundered loungewear she had unlocked from in a suitcase in a bus station earlier that day. Setting aside her belongings under the window sill, Nora bundled up the vault suit and began using it as a pillow. After the days they'd been having, she wondered if she ought to try getting used to sleeping in armor. _No,_ she thought firmly, as an act to try to regain a sense of normalcy in her life. Besides, the clothes felt so nice, so _orderly_ , so very much _not_ like wearing a vault suit. _Oh yes, wearing clean laundry of a dead man is perfectly normal._ She scoffed. _I'll take whatever I can get._

Distant laughter floated in through the glassless window as the three conversed amongst themselves downstairs by the campfire. Nora rolled over, thinking vaguely about how lucky she was to have amusing company. In fact, she thought often about how extremely fortunate that the people she had run into so far had not tried to kill her or take advantage of the fact that she knew absolutely nothing about the world she tumbled right into. She may as well have been born yesterday with her lack of fundamental knowledge. How many other vault dwellers were out there from her era? How many other people were running around as ghouls from her time?

Nora could feel her thoughts starting to settle; they often did at night when she wasn't on the move. Sometimes they were back with Nate and Shaun and her life before-her, studying diligently to finally pass the Bar exam and put her law degree back to use, and he was thinking of getting back into the civilian workforce. Nate had wanted to become a personal trainer, but was also conflicted by his dream to run a bakery. Nora chuckled, remember that she had told him that at least one would make sure that his customers came back for the other. She on the other hand would have such a time striding into the State building as the city's only lawyer with an undercut. Nevermind that she had hair whiter than most of the judges', they'd ask her to present so many forms of ID to be sure she wasn't some crust punk impersonating a law official. Now, however, it seems her type of haircut would probably get her past a group of raiders unscathed. It didn't, of course, and Nick had a few more holes in his duster to show for it. She would patch them up if she ever came across a sewing kit. Maybe Codsworth knew a thing or two about tailoring.

"Ha. Oh, if Nate could see me now," she spoke aloud. She often toyed with the idea of what he might think of his wife toting around a pistol and a crude machete. Not that neither of them have never owned or used guns before, but they had decided to give them away to their relatives once Shaun had been born. She wanted to keep them in the family until he was of age to understand and be taught gun safety, but she supposed that was neither here nor there now. Two centuries have passed, yet there was virtually no time between waking up that morning to attend an event at the Veteran's hall and waking up to watch her husband being shot seven feet in front of her. One of Shaun's first memories would involve a gun and watching what happens when you don't have one to defend your family. He would face the cruelty of the world before he could cognitively understand it. And watch his father, the strongest person she knew, wasted in the space of a breath.

His last words?

 _"You're not taking Shaun!"_

Nora closed her eyes and inhaled sharply. _Of course those were his last._ The memory had been re-lived to the point that she feared the tears have stopped coming for it. _A dedicated father, right up to end._ The memory was always accompanied by the same impulsive question: Would he have been shot if he had just complied?

She snorted, heavily doubting it would have ever gone that way. _Absolutely not. Not my Nate._ About four nights of every seven, she was dedicated to resurfacing what she could, recounting everything for later record at her home terminal.

"Nathaniel Oliver Pendragon. US Army, 2nd Battalion, 108th Infantry Regiment. Decorated Sino-American War Veteran." Nora paused, grasping to remember what he had been decorated for, but nothing came immediately to mind. Had they really talked about the things he did for the war? She bit her lip, thinking hard about why she had never bother to ask. _I... guess I thought I had more time._ Nora hiccuped, and realised that this was a new thought, and it was threatening to reopen the closing wound if she let it. A familiar tightness she hadn't felt in weeks was beginning to form in her chest, and inhaled sharply. _More time. More time with Nate and my son. My family._

She shook her head to stave off the strange guilt she felt about surviving. _I will not blame myself for this._

"Nate Pendragon. Son. Brother. Uncle. Great-great-grandson. Father. Friend." Her throat caught for a moment. " _Best_ friend." The moon was rising in the sky now, and her mind took advantage of the time to try and go through a delayed grieving process. Nora knew she would have to find a way to repay the Oberland ladies for taking Nick off of her hands for the night; she was solaced to not have anyone see her in such a state.

Shaun was waiting on her. Garvey was counting on her. Dogmeat looked up to her. Codsworth worried over her. And Nick?

Nora dimmed the lantern and allowed herself this peace of mind, waiting for whatever dredge to float up to the surface. _What_ of _Nick?_ _I'm the one that needs_ him _. I'm a client, and the case is all there is to it._ She heard another a smidgen of inflection from his gravelly voice and another shriek of laughter from one of the sisters. She wondered if this was considered time they were spending was off the clock and how many caps she owed him. Maybe... maybe they'd get a good haul of junk and she wouldn't have to worry about that. She'd heard Bunker Hill was _The_ big trading hub, so maybe she'd have collected enough to insured his fees would be covered by the time they rolled through. Luckily for her, it didn't seem like he was the type to expect sexual favours in lieu of payment.

She wasn't even sure synths thought about those things. Codsworth sure as hell didn't.

...Right?

"I'm a synth. Synthetic man. All the parts, minus a few red blood cells." That's what he'd told her. What did he mean by "all the parts?" Did she really need to know what that means in case he needed an organ transplant, or was that sarcasm? Nora grimaced in frustration, coming to terms with how little she could claim she knew for certain; she absolutely hated this sudden uneasement. _Ugh. Unknown factors._

What did she know about synths? _W_ hat did she _know_ about Nick Valentine?

This wasn't the first night she'd mulled the thought of her partner over in her head, and every night she remained with the same unanswered questions. She thought about investing some waking hours in talking with him about this, but the opportunity was usually interrupted by their surroundings. And Mama Murphy had said she could trust him to help. But hell's bells, Mama Murphy was also on some serious drug-induced trip when she said that. Her past experiences have led her to know the words of someone under the influence are not the best advice, but to her credit the old woman hadn't been wrong either.

Considering she didn't have any way to research synths and what they're about, Nora put her focus on exactly what made Nick Valentine, well, _Nick Valentine._ He was an early model synthetic human-robot hybrid. He didn't just have made up memories or programmed traits, but rather he ran off of the memories and personality of a person who had lived during her time and volunteered for the procedure. Did Nick know why he did this? Maybe she might have seen the real Nick Valentine with her own eyes once upon a time. _Getting a cruller or sitting in a squad car or even pushing a shopping cart at the Super Duper Mart picking up Salisbury Steaks for dinner_ , she thought, imagining a more humanly-looking Nick doing all of these things.

He never really said when he came out of the trash heap, so to know how long he's been roaming the Commonwealth is uncertain. For all she knew, he could have only been working a circuit for a year and barely knew anymore than she did. He had enough of a reputation to run a business but still managed to get himself into situations that might be a little too much for him. His secretary, Ellie, had been worried that since he was the dangerously reckless type, he would continue taking on cases that would probably put him in an early...

 _...grave? Do you bury synths or just sort of throw them in the incinerator?_ Nora chewed on the thought. _Could you transfer the idea of one into another unit and have them, essentially, live forever?_ Moreover, while she was on the subject, could _she_ ever do something like that?

She wrinkled her nose. Having woken up from a sleep that outlasted everyone she had ever known, she could say with absolute certainty that immortality was grossly overrated.

Anyway, another thing was that Nick didn't sleep, and she was still adjusting to the idea that he would watch her while she did. Now whether he actively observed her or passively kept a lookout was another yet _unknown_ that that was worrisome. Perhaps she could give him a bit more credit, as it's been this long and she hasn't woken up with a pair of cement shoes and a knife in the back. He also hasn't, er, exposed himself to her in any weird way, she's never woken up to him staring at her, and he kept a generously respectful distance away from her person at all times. She had never really felt uncomfortable around him as a direct cause of something he said or did. In fact, most of her discomfort was caused by her lack of synth understanding. Yeah, Nick had a mouth on him and could definitely shoot back a clever zinger without trying, but he was never intentionally mean towards her, and often talked about giving people a hand.

Well, _when_ they talked. Neither of them said much on the road, and Nora was too lost in her own thoughts to really offer up much to say. They would go hours without speaking until one of them felt like they were being watched and motioned for the other to be on guard. She was glad he could read body language and she only had to crouch or draw her weapon to get him to do the same. Sometimes he saw the danger first and she would clumsily follow along, unaware of what was going on until a Super Mutant Mutt was biting her in the hip. Nick was very skilled at spotting Raider and Gunner camps while it took huge sacks of rotting meat for her to realise Super Mutants were around. She supposed he had to be good to have lived this long. Outside of this, she'd have to ask him directly about his thoughts. Mostly came with one-liners, but it's not like she asked for complicated or indepth. Maybe she ought to also start asking how things were going between them, too. _Being professional about it, of course._

Nora sighed. She always had a problem with being stupidly conflicted for no reason, but there was no handbook on how someone should act when your family is gone and you're forced to rely on the hospitality of strangers in a foreign setting. Anxiety is probably an appropriate thing to have, though.

 _Nick has not been cruel to you, Nora. He has not betrayed you, lead you to believe that he would betray you, you haven't given him reason to betray you, and is actively looking out for you, remember? He sent you to bed under the guise of helping himself, but you should know by now how sarcasm works.  
_  
 _So just. Let. It. Be. Let it be._

"You'd be shocked how many people I've managed to convince I'm just a really sick Ghoul," she heard him say just now, and once again the girls were laughing. Nora smirked, wondering if he had been flirting with them this whole time.

 _Bright heart, indeed._ She exhaled, finally coming to peace for the night. Now she could sleep. Nora clicked through radio stations on the Pipboy, searching to find that classical station she liked to help her ease into dreamland. Just as she was thinking she could go for a cup of hot tea and other old world luxuries, a deafening **_BOOM!_** drummed from above the house. It rattled the floorboards and shook dust down from the exposed rafters from sheer vibrations echoing across the woods.

"'The _hell_ was _that_?!" one of the voices hollered from outside. She could hear birds fluttering and squawking away angrily in multiple directions. Nora was on her feet and all but threw herself out the window to see what was going on. There was a second, louder, _closer,_ heart-shuddering explosion and she was just in time to get hit with a faceful of searing yellow-green light.

"Good God! 'You catch the plates on that one?" Nora was blinking away inverted colors. She heard one of the girls ("What do you mean by plates?"), but they were barely audible over the tinny ringing in her ears.

"What are you talking about? What happened?!" she shouted down, sounding like she was speaking through a pillow. Trees off in the distance were ablaze, red fingers raking the black sky. A visible divide in the grove allowed gray smoke to billow up, filtering out stars. She looked in other directions to see if anyone else had been attracted to the sound, but when she realised no one was coming, she also supposed no one was stupid enough to go running towards the sounds of danger.

"No way anyone survived that!" Nick hollered as Nora leaned dumbstruck out of the window. He was strangely calm about the entire thing, cigarette still hanging out of his mouth as he spoke. "Though I guess we ought to make sure."

A/N: Hey folks, Charlie here. It took me the better part of an hour to understand how to update an edited chapter, but much thanks to a QQuina for that important bit of insight. I've also decided to take off the [wt] Working Title tag from the name, since I won't be making an effort to change it. It works already, after all. The next installment is pretty much already in the works, but I'll be out of town this weekend and away from a keyboard for the entire time. If you celebrate Christmas, Festivus, or any holiday or non-holiday this winter solstice, have a good one, and I hope you get everything you need. If it's summer where you are or are not celebrating anything at all, also have a good one. I'll see you all on Tuesday.

 _Stay safe out there._


End file.
